Shareef El-Sissi, CEO of Nexus Agriscience – Interview Series

What subjects did you study while attending UC-Davis? What were ultimately the most useful courses in business management that you took while in your undergrad?

I studied Managerial Economics at UC Davis, which was essentially the university’s business management track. I’ve always been drawn to classical economics, but the most useful takeaways were the practical ones: business communications, accounting that translated directly into real decision-making and personal finance, and the discipline that comes from managing deadlines and workload at scale.

School didn’t prepare me to be an entrepreneur, but it did teach structure—how to break down problems, prioritize, and execute. In hindsight, I wish I had engaged more deeply with the UC Davis agriculture ecosystem. It’s one of the most advanced ag institutions on the West Coast, and there were meaningful R&D opportunities on campus. At the time, I was already deeply involved in medical cannabis production, so I treated school more like a requirement than a platform. Looking back, I would have leveraged it very differently.

Did you ever envision you’d be working in and with the cannabis industry to the extent that you do during your studies? Given how heavily prohibited cannabis was back then, I wouldn’t imagine so.

No, not to this extent. I grew up in Fremont, close to Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco—the epicenter of modern medical cannabis. By the time I turned 18, I understood how the medical recommendation system worked, was familiar with Bay Area dispensaries, and was aware of the early advocates whose work helped catalyze what became a global movement.

During school, I was essentially living a dual life—driving back and forth between Davis and the Bay Area to participate in the cooperative model supplying dispensaries, while maintaining my studies. I still remember preparing for midterms in the library when a dispensary I worked closely with was raided by the DEA. I stepped outside, took the calls, took a breath, went back in, finished my exams, and only then drove back to see what was left. That gives you a sense of how different the time was—and how far the industry has come.

As someone who studied business in school, what caught your professional attention about cannabis and the robust sciences behind it?

At first, it wasn’t the science—it was the plant and the impact. After I graduated in 2008, I was asked to help restructure a medical dispensary business from a sole proprietorship into a collective while regulations were evolving in real time. I applied what I’d just learned about how small businesses should be built, managed, and kept operational under pressure.

What kept me in the industry was a deeper conviction: cannabis as a legitimate tool for balance and wellness, and a plant that could reduce reliance on certain parts of the pharmaceutical system. Over time, the science became impossible to ignore. Once you understand that chemical profiles can drive radically different experiences and outcomes, the business opportunity and the scientific upside converge. That’s when my focus shifted from simply participating in the industry to helping build the technical foundation it was missing.

How was Terpene Belt Farms first founded, and what manufacturing gaps in the industry did Terpene Belt Farms hope to fill at first?

Around 2013, the dispensary group I was part of had a strong culture of innovation. Cannabis labs were just beginning to emerge in California, and instead of relying entirely on third parties, we asked a simple question: what if we built our own analytical testing capability?

My brother was working in medical devices, so I asked him what it would take. We leased a small industrial lab space, acquired a gas chromatograph, and built a system to analyze the product and vendor samples moving through the dispensary. That lab became a real business—and it pushed us into terpene analytics earlier and deeper than most of the industry. Our dataset later supported a 2016 peer-reviewed paper that argued cannabis should move beyond “indica/sativa/hybrid” and toward chemically defined archetypes.

As testing became more competitive and revenue compressed, like many labs we expanded into extraction. We acquired a Waters CO₂ system and began manufacturing vapes and extracts. That’s where the real gap became obvious: the best vape products were 100% cannabis, but there was no reliable way to source high-quality cannabis-derived terpenes at scale. If you wanted authentic aroma inputs, you had to make them yourself.

So we did. We began producing cannabis-derived terpenes via steam distillation and refining them out of extracts. As our vape business grew, we occasionally had to lean on botanical terpenes to keep up with demand, and the difference in user experience was immediate—less authentic, less complete, less cannabis. That gap between what the plant can deliver and what the market could reliably supply is what ultimately became Terpene Belt Farms: a dedicated, scalable source of authentic cannabis-derived aroma ingredients.

When California’s state plan was approved following the 2018 Farm Bill allowing hemp cultivation, we saw the opportunity to scale top-shelf cannabis-type aroma profiles with cannabinoids bred out—operating outside of 280E and the friction of closed-loop regulated markets. In 2019, we canceled a planned cannabis cultivation project and planted a 10-acre hemp farm using genetics developed by Dr. Mark Lewis. The objective was clear: scale cannabinoid-free, cannabis-type terpenes that could be sold across state lines and internationally as ingredients, not controlled substances.

From a cultivation and consumption standpoint, how does a rich terpene profile change the quality of the bud itself?

Properly cured flower is still the benchmark cannabis experience—and that experience is driven by more than cannabinoids. It’s driven by the entire aromatic fraction: terpenes and other volatile compounds that shape both perception and effect. Together, they create what I’d call a complete cannabis experience.

When cannabinoids are high but aromatics are weak, you often get blunt, low-resolution effects—anxiety, confusion, couch-lock, and a lack of nuance or direction. Historically, cannabis was lower in THC and richer in aromatic complexity, which produced broader and more balanced experiences.

Modern indoor cultivation—especially high-input, salt-fed systems—has pushed THC percentages into the 30s and 40s, but often at the expense of terpene concentration and diversity. The resin gland has finite metabolic bandwidth. When breeding and cultivation chase THC as the primary output, terpenes usually lose.

As a rule of thumb: if you don’t see roughly ~1% terpenes for every 10 points of THC, it’s unlikely the flower delivers at the highest quality tier. High terpene content requires the full stack: strong genetics, skilled cultivation, and careful post-harvest handling. Rich terpene profiles are both a sign of quality and a driver of it.

Why was Terpene Belt Farms changed to Nexus Agriscience and how will Nexus be operating both differently and similarly?

Terpene Belt Farms started as the name of our farm, and it became synonymous with our product—fresh-harvested, steam-distilled cannabis terpenes. In cannabis, “Terpene Belt Farms — fresh, never frozen” became shorthand for authenticity and quality.

As we expanded into broader flavor, fragrance, and functional markets, we discovered a brand ceiling: outside of cannabis, the term “terpenes” often signals a low-value commodity input, which is the opposite of how we see our materials and what they can do. At the same time, we were no longer just producing raw extracts—we were investing in genetics, downstream processing, fractionation, isolation, and purification, targeting applications well beyond cannabis.

We also integrated upstream by joining forces with Dr. Mark Lewis and the Biotech Institute team, bringing protected germplasm and deep genetics R&D into the company. At that point, “Terpene Belt Farms” felt too narrow for the platform we had actually built.

Nexus Agriscience represents the broader system: agriculture plus science, genetics plus processing, cannabis heritage plus global applications. Terpene Belt Farms now functions as a legacy brand and a pillar inside a larger, more versatile company.

What stays the same is our foundation: plant-based, hemp-derived ingredients and a commitment to authenticity and quality. What changes is scope: Nexus can operate credibly across global flavor, fragrance, and functional markets—with brands and product strategies tailored to each end use rather than a single farm-centric identity.

On a scientific level, how is Nexus Agriscience “revolutionizing the chemical industry by actualizing hemp’s potential”? How does Nexus plan on utilizing and researching hemp to access every part of this versatile crop’s possibilities?

Most of the world has only looked at cannabis and hemp through the cannabinoid lens. Prohibition kept major multinationals in flavor, fragrance, and chemicals from seriously evaluating the plant beyond CBD. Many saw the early CBD economy as unregulated and inconsistent, and stayed away.

“We view hemp as a biosynthesis factory. Instead of building multi-step petrochemical processes to manufacture an ingredient, we design genetics and agronomy so the plant performs that biosynthesis using sunlight, water, and scalable agriculture.”

Through the acquisition of the Biotech Institute hemp portfolio, we gained access to intellectual property that reframed what this crop can be. Cannabis is uniquely powerful as a chemical production chassis. It can allocate an unusually high percentage of biomass into chemical output through the resin gland, and its genome is highly steerable through breeding—and eventually advanced engineering. It also runs multiple robust biosynthetic pathways, which makes it capable of producing a wide range of target molecules.

We view hemp as a biosynthesis factory. Instead of building multi-step petrochemical processes to manufacture an ingredient, we design genetics and agronomy so the plant performs that biosynthesis using sunlight, water, and scalable agriculture.

The opportunity is to replace or supplement petroleum-derived and artificially synthesized ingredients across food, fragrance, pharmaceuticals, and everyday consumer goods with plant-based, chemically identical versions produced in hemp. Precision fermentation is one attempt to do this with microbes; we’re doing it with a field crop that already scales efficiently.

In the near term, we’re focused on the resin gland and volatile chemistry—hundreds of identified compounds in our oils. Over time, our molecular farming platform enables varieties optimized for multi-stream output, more like a refinery than a single-product crop.

That’s what we mean by actualizing hemp’s potential: making it a foundational renewable platform for chemistry that is currently tied to petroleum, and building a modern agricultural supply chain that can scale to millions of acres.

What scientific and technological factors went into the creation of the Flower Flavor-Compound Reference Dataset?

In December 2025, we were awarded a $1.23 million State of California grant alongside UCLA, UC Davis, and S3 Collective to create a Flower Flavor-Compound Reference Database.

The core regulatory problem is simple: states want to restrict synthetic, candy-like flavoring in inhalable products to protect public health and reduce youth appeal, but they don’t have a scientific method to distinguish authentic cannabis-derived aroma from artificial confectionery flavor systems. That makes enforcement inconsistent, easy to exploit, and dangerous for the long-term stability of the vape category.

Our role in the grant is rooted in our deep work on non-cannabinoid aromatics. Technically, we’re contributing advanced analytical methods to characterize the aromatic fraction of cannabis at high resolution, and a framework to interpret profiles by compound classes, ratios, and functional group patterns—not just individual compounds.

For example, certain ester-heavy “candy” signatures may occur naturally in cannabis, but typically within biological bounds. A reference dataset allows regulators to define what naturally plausible cannabis chemistry looks like, then identify profiles that are outside what the plant can realistically produce.

The outcome is a dataset the state can use to make defensible determinations: “This product’s flavor profile is consistent with naturally occurring cannabis-type aroma,” or, “This profile is outside biological cannabis bounds and is likely non-compliant.”

Our stance is a middle path: protect the real diversity of cannabis—which can legitimately express fruit-forward and confectionary-adjacent notes—while drawing a clear line against products that are essentially conventional candy flavoring labeled as a “strain.”

Outside of the cannabis industry, what types of industries and products most commonly utilize Nexus’ hemp-derived flavoring formulations?

We’ve seen early adoption across a wider range of categories than most people expect, because functionally these are complex, natural flavor and aroma solutions. The most exciting traction right now is in social beverages, where formulators are starting to understand terpene-rich inputs as experiential actives—not just flavor. Even without cannabinoids, aromatic chemistry can shape mood and perception, which is highly aligned with the “beyond alcohol” category.

We’ve completed a self-GRAS determination for use of our ingredients in non-alcoholic beverages, and we’re pursuing an FDA “no questions” GRAS pathway for alcoholic beverage use. We’re also building toward compliant access to the dietary supplement market.

Beyond beverages, our roadmap includes fractionation of our oils into high-value streams for fine fragrance and specialty chemicals, and ultimately plant-based alternatives for commodity ingredients that are currently petrochemical in origin.

Looking forward into the future, what are some further large-scale impactful ways in which hemp-derived products and commodities could be used (food production, construction supplies, textiles, etc.)?

Hemp has multiple value streams, but our focus is what the plant can produce through its resin glands and core biosynthetic pathways. Cannabis is unusually engineerable as a molecular farming chassis. We don’t see the future as single-compound crops—we see varieties engineered to output portfolios of 5–10 valuable compounds per plant, more like refinery economics than traditional agriculture.

Strategically, this aligns with macro forces already shaping global markets: replacing synthetic dyes and additives in foods and personal care, reducing dependence on foreign supply chains and petrochemical intermediates, and rebuilding domestic agricultural and chemical infrastructure for both public health and national security.

In practice, this could translate into millions of acres of hemp cultivated not for CBD or THC hype cycles, but for targeted chemical production—while still supporting fiber, seed, and other co-products as secondary streams. If executed correctly, hemp becomes a permanent, renewable American cash crop—continually reinventing itself as new chemistries, geographies, and applications are unlocked.